


Hidden

by sparxwrites



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Body Horror, Ender!Rythian, Friendship, Trust Issues, non-human protagonist, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-01
Packaged: 2018-02-19 13:25:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2389874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What’s underneath your scarf?” asks Zoey, one morning over breakfast.</p><p>Rythian freezes, pausing with a piece of bread halfway to being slid under his scarf and into his mouth. “…Why?” he asks, slowly, and there’s an odd caution that sounds almost like <i>fear</i> in his voice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hidden

“What’s underneath your scarf?” asks Zoey, one morning over breakfast.

Rythian freezes, pausing with a piece of bread halfway to being slid under his scarf and into his mouth. “…Why?” he asks, slowly, and there’s an odd caution that sounds almost like _fear_ in his voice.

If Zoey picks up on it, she doesn’t comment. Instead, she shrugs, finishes chewing on the piece of bacon she’d just put in her mouth before answering. “I dunno? I mean, I guess there must be _something_ under there, considering you’re so fussy about keeping it hidden-”

“I am _not_ fussy,” he mutters, raises a protective hand to touch his lips through his scarf.

“-and I mean, I’ve been your apprentice for, like, _ages_ now,” she continues, as if he hadn’t interrupted. “I was just curious, really.” She finally seems to note the discomfort creasing the corner of his eyes, and wrinkles her nose in response. “I mean, you don’t _have_ to, I just wanted to ask.”

Rythian sighs. He’d known she’d ask eventually; is surprised she’s waited this long before doing so, if he’s honest, given how poor her impulse control usually is.

She’s right, though. She _has_ been his apprentice for ages, and although they’ve had their… issues, every now and then, she’s never turned on him, never asked too many questions or tried to pull his scarf down. Never tried to hurt him. Never tried to pin him down, take a scalpel to him, carve him up to see how he works-

Clamping down on that train of thought with a vicious brutality, not willing to go there right now, he nods. “Okay,” he says, quietly, before he can change his mind. He sets his bread down and pushing his chair back from the table, standing up. “I suppose you do-” He hesitates, tries to find the right word. “I suppose you deserve to know.”

The cautious, borderline-paranoid part of his mind says that, if he’s really going to do this, he at least wants to have a clear line of escape if Zoey reacts poorly. If he’s on his feet, he can run away, take off. Get _out_ , however he has to.

As much as he hopes Zoey won’t be bothered by the state of his lower face, he’s pretty sure there’s a high chance she will be. It’s not pretty.

Zoey makes a loud, delighted noise, jumps out of her own chair and darts around the table to stand in front of him. “Really?” she says, sounding considerably overexcited. “Oh my gosh! I didn’t think you’d actually say yes, oh gosh.”

Her enthusiasm is both comforting and… not.

“Its, ah. A little odd,” he says, in warning, sighs when Zoey simply makes an impatient noise in response. Slowly, ever so slowly, he pulls his scarf down and lets it hang in a loose coil around his neck, baring his lower face. He hesitates, and then opens his mouth, lips peeled back to expose the inside of it.

“That’s pretty stylin’, actually.” Zoey squints at him, peers at the jagged points of his teeth lit by the steady purple glow that coats the inside of his mouth and tongue. If it can really be called a tongue – it doesn’t look like anything like human tongue, more a collection of massed, coiling tendrils, knotting themselves together in an ever-shifting twist.

Compared to that, the thin, white delta-lines of scars carved deep into his skin and massed around his lips are hardly worth commenting on. At least they’re comparatively human.

“What?” Rythian blinks, confused, closes his mouth. Of all the possible reactions he’d anticipated, from fear to poorly-hidden disgust, cautious curiosity had not been one of them. Even the cautiousness seems to be fading, as Zoey tilts her head to one side and leans a little closer to get a better look.

He leans back automatically, frowns when she grins. “Your mouth. It’s pretty cool. All…” She holds a hand up to her mouth, presses the heel of her palm against her lips and wiggles her fingers in a poor imitation of his not-tongue. “How do you speak so normally?”

Rythian hesitates, and then opens his mouth again, carefully coaxes the strands of his ‘tongue’ to twist together and flatten. Like that, they look reasonably human, a fair approximation of an actual tongue despite their purple luminosity. “It took a bit of practice,” he admits, watches the way Zoey’s eyes light up with excitement. “But it’s fairly easy, now.”

She hums thoughtfully, processing this new piece of information, and scratches at the back of her head. “Why doesn’t the rest of your skin glow, if the inside of your mouth does?”

“It’s, ah. Not actually the skin that’s glowing.” He licks at his lips, spreads a trail of lilac phosphorescence in the wake of the motion, and Zoey oohs quietly. When she reaches out a hand to touch, though, he flinches away, grabs at the loose curve of his scarf under his chin and drags it back over his mouth. “No!”

It’s an effort to bite down on the static-crackle snarl of alarm that builds in his throat, the strands of his tongue flaring in a rattling hiss, and he doesn’t quite manage to suppress all of it. He tries to cover it with a cough, doesn’t quite manage that either judging by the alarm in Zoey’s eyes, and feels the blood rush to his cheeks in embarrassed awkwardness.

He hates it when his Ender heritage shows itself, hates it with a passion, and the fact he can’t control it just makes things worse.

Wincing, Zoey lets her hand fall back to her side. “Sorry,” she says, makes an nervous noise somewhere between a giggle and a snort. “It just looked really cool!”  
“It’s- okay,” Rythian says quietly, sighs, runs a half-anxious hand through his hair. “Just- don’t touch.”

“I guess sticking your fingers in other people’s mouths _is_ kind of weird,” agrees  Zoey cheerfully, apparently recovered from the shock of Rythian’s snarl and otherwise unphased by the revelation of her teacher’s less-than-human status and disturbing mouth arrangement. “Even if they’re particularly stylin’ mouths.”

Rythian’s not particularly sure his mouth counts as _stylin’_ – is fairly sure it’s closer to monstrous, or evil, or really _anything_ that’s not remotely positive – but he says nothing. Instead, he smiles, the tug of his cheeks creasing the fabric of his scarf into familiar folds, and watches as Zoey grins widely back. 


End file.
